The Post Money Value

In London (again)

I'm back in London working on some portfolio business in and around the greater London area.  Standard blogging disclaimers (time, typos from the Blackberry, frequency, etc) apply.

First Coverage is Hiring

Our portfolio company, First Coverage, has some slots open.  First Coverage sells software in the financial services industry.  Randy Cass and Colin Webster are the co-founders.  They've built up a great team in Toronto and Boston.

These two slots are in Toronto.

First, a sale wiz in the financial services world.  The calling card is your sales skills and past success.   You get a chance to change the world, make some great coin, get a piece of the action, and work with a super set of people.

The second is an experienced java developer.  Normal able to leap talk buildings in a single bound job description applies.  JAVA, JAVA Script, SQL, JBOSS, etc. 

Have some experience and drop the First Coverage guys a line at: careers@firstcoverage.com or send your resume to me.

When They Show up - Say Hello

I've got a fairly stupid problem with our exchange server, mostly likely a configuration error.  I'm so rusty with this stuff that it is usually my error.

Like 99% of you, I hit the Internet (via a search) to dig up results.  When I typed in the particular error message into Google and then clicked on a relevant result, the page I landed on had this howdy in the middle of the page:

The clip about comes from Expert Exchange, a for fee place to ask and get answers about Exchange.  

Typically, most people click on a result link, take about 2 seconds or less to determine if the result is what they want and, if not, hit the back button to try another one.  In the case here, they try to keep me from that back button by getting me to look on their site before heading back to the search engine.

When they show up from a search engine (paid results or not), make it personal and say hello.

(And it was my configuration check box problem)

VeohTV and Dueling Advertisers

I've been playing around with VeohTV.  Like Joost, it is another one of those watch TV on your computer services.  unlike Joost, it doesn't appear to be sucking up my computer's resources.  While Joost has some interesting eye candy, the programming (I know, it's beta) badly placed commercial interruptions, and general bad performance actually nudged me into looking around for other solutions.

[Side note: If you'd like to see what happens when copyright expires, head over to streamick. This is a pretty interesting directory of links/channels of old time movies in different genres like SciFi, Crime, etc.]

I pulled down the VeohTV application and started zipping around the offerings.  Like Joost, they had the Onion News Network so I was able to compare the two feeds. VeohTV does a better job of ad placement from the perspective of not chopping the piece of content at a completely dumb point.

The funnier thing I noticed was that many of the directory pages had this sponsorship clip on them:

Nice win for VeohTV.  Pesky problem for verizon.  After you click a selection that appears on this sponsored page, you get a video ad for AT&T.  In fact if you do a 'play all' thing where available, you never see the verizon sponsorship note again but you do see the AT&T Video ad again.  And Again.

Ouch.

And Sorry in Advance

Spelling and grammer will be bad as I hack a few posts from my blackberry.

No, not the OQO, yowsa, close but no cigar. (Sergey, all yours on Wednesday)

A very stark difference

I'm on the train from Amsterdam to London. (I'll do anything to avoid taking my shoes off before I get transport)

There are two women sitting next two. Over the past 6 minutes they have spoken to me in one language, between themselves in another and on their respecitve cell phones in yet two more. This is on top of having reading material in another one.

I was proud of having, please, thank you, where's the toliet, another beer, and one time liquidation preferance nailed in 4 languages.

After watching these two, I shudder with visions of Tommy Tourist belting out 'who here speakada englaz?'

Amazing..

It Is All About the People

Over the weekend, The Globe and Mail (National paper in Canada) had an article by Avner Mandelman talking about the great people vs. business debate.  This is the argument where some will tell you 'B' team with 'A' business plan beats the reverse.  Others, of course, bet on the opposite, i.e. give me 'A' players with the 'B' plan.

While never black and white, people do matter as a top priority.  Avner's article is a good read (here until gone behind a firewall).

Disclosure: Nstein is mentioned and is a JLA investment.

It was a timely story because of the shifts happening at other JLA companies.

Butch Langlois who was the CEO of Truition, moved over to take on PlanetEye as the CEO.  He was instrumental in helping Truition get where she is and then proactively worked with me as well as other board members to get a guy who can move Truition to the next phase of her growth. 

When Butch determined that PE needed some additional talent and business relationships with blogging and community systems, he  turned to Jeremy Wright, the CEO of b5 networks.  Presto. The two companies launched some biz dev plans and agreed to have Mark Evans keep doing blogs for b5 while at the same time join PE to help get that puppy launched.

No weird agendas, just smart CEOs in our JLA talent pool working together, sharing ideas, and getting the jobs done.

After watching all the people activities these past few months, I'm solidly in the camp of: It's all about the people.

For JLA, we have truly solid people.

An OQO Test Flight

I'm currently on a 15 day trek in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. armed with a new OQO ultra something.  This is somewhat like having a Blackberry with a serious thyroid problem.

The test is to see if there is some compromise between the blackberry and a full laptop. This is the third device I have tried.  The other two, Sony's attempt and that weird version one of the Samsung UMPC, both never made it past one day's use.

Over the next several days, I will give you field reports on the good, the bad, and the ugly as I try to live on this with my trusty Blackberry warily watching.

As for right now, I'm at the gate in Heathrow heading to Amsterdam after a number of meetings in London.  Stay tuned.

Shortsighted Greed

I recently had a conversation with two 'grand old men' of the VC community regarding an investment they had just completed.  It was a small start up which had taken angel money to get going.  The terms of that original deal were a simple debt instrument that converted (at a discount) upon the next round.

These two guys were all high five like because they had killed the discount upon conversion.  The phase that bugged me the most was: "We made the angels blink and understand the real money had arrived."

What crap.

To kill angels is to kill off the very source of capital we need in the ecosystem. In this case, it was 20% and the company was doing well. The VCs loved the deal but felt this was a great spot to squeeze a little extra.

Again, what crap.

I argued my point and was blown off as a newbie that simply didn't get it.

My council to you is to protect your angel as we need a viable angel community.  One way to accomplish this is instead of a discount, give the angel warrants to buy additional shares at a strike price which gives the angel a reward for being there at the start. 

In almost all cases, those warrants won't be negotiated away.  Yes, they become part of the cap table of the company and yes, it will impact value conversations.  In my opinion, this is a far better way to give angel a true shot at some upside when your company needs additional rounds of funding and the angel can't continue to fund. 

Angels are important and everybody in this game needs to understand and respect this.

Happy Canada Day and 4th of July

I'm out of the country this week.  We'll return to our regular issues flogging on the 9th.

Enjoy your week.